Nobel Prize in Physics Awarded: Fair or Foul?

The Nobel Prize committee went off the board yesterday, awarding — despite Wired Science readers’ clear preference for graphene’s discoverers — the prize in physics to three theoretical physicists whose work has illuminated the nature of matter.

Yochiro Nambu, Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa — of, respectively, the Enrico Fermi Laboratory, the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization and Kyoto University — study what are known as broken symmetries: the ways in which, at the level of quarks, the standard laws of physics necessarily break down.

Nobody’s actually seen this, but physicists say it must be true, as broken symmetries unify three of the four fundamental forces of nature (gravity being the pesky outlier) and appear to explain why the universe was not annihilated shortly after the Big Bang by the mutual antagonism of matter and antimatter.

So in the same way that Steve Reich is a more important artist than M.I.A., I guess
broken symmetries are a bigger deal than graphene, the basic structural element of graphite, whose understanding could lead to better electrodes, circuits, solar cells and batteries.

Then again: who would you rather listen to on a Friday night: Steve Reich or M.I.A.?

Graphene was the clear favorite in yesterday’s Wired Science readers poll, with Andre Geim and Kostya Novoselov — its discoverers — beating out dark matter explorer Vera Rubin and quasicrystal pioneers Roger Penrose
Dan Shechtman. But as broken symmetries were overlooked by the Nobel
Prize candidate predictors at Thomson Reuters, readers never had a chance to choose.

What do you think, Wired Science readers: did the Nobel Prize committee get it right, or should the award in physics have gone to
Geim and Novoselov? Vote away.